Obesity becoming a problem in China

Debra Brun opens her extremely interesting and informative article, In China, obesity becomes a problem that’s foreign to survivors of its great famine, published by the Washington Post, on December 31, 2012, with the following words:
"Older people in China remember the Great Famine of 1958-61, when 15 million to 45 million people died of hunger and related causes."

Today, nearly every street corner in Beijing and many other cities seems to boast a McDonald’s. There are KFC outlets (see photo below) in almost every Chinese city, 3,700 in all. Meanwhile, newly minted members of the Chinese middle class have rushed to buy cars, leaving bicycles that were once a major source of exercise rusting on the street. Pizza Hut is considered a fancy date-night restaurant, T.G.I. Friday’s has several branches in Beijing, and cans of Coca-Cola are sold at every corner stand.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the percentage of adults who are overweight and obese rose from 25% in 2002 to 38.5% in 2010, a perriod of just 8 years, in a population of 1.37 billion. Urban dwellers account for much of this. WHO projects that 50 to 57% of the Chinese population will be too heavy by 2015. (By comparison, 69% of Americans age, 20 and older, are overweight or obese.) Frightening figures, indeed, and a disturbing development. In a very short time the Chinese will not only have caught up with the Americans in terms of their economy, but also in terms of being overweight and obese.

There’s a standing joke, notes Lyn Wren, a physician with International SOS Beijing Clinic, that “Chinese waistlines are growing faster than the GDP.”

The onset of obesity has been even more explosive than the national economic growth. Even as recently as five years ago, obesity wasn’t recognized as a problem by health professionals in China.

The Chinese Health Ministry claims to have introduced healthful eating programs in schools and the construction of more playgrounds to promote exercise, but nationwide campaigns about eating healthfully and exercising are not evident.

More importantly, officials have failed to get their priorities right. When Paul French, a Shanghai-based author of “Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation.” spoke with officials he was told that "Right now we’re trying to tell them to do and not do a lot of things, such as not spitting on the street, not dropping trash everywhere and not driving 'like complete idiots.”

Moreover, although the era of famine is long past, many grandparents and parents still push their children to eat a lot.

Setsuko Hosoda, a family doctor at Beijing United Family Hospital, says the parents and grandparents she sees are “always worried that their child is not eating enough.” A 2012 Penn State study of 176 Chinese children ages 6 to 18 found that 72% of mothers of overweight children thought their children were normal or underweight.

Sissi Zhong, a 26-year-old Beijing secretary, recalls that her grandparents got angry if she left food on her plate when she was a child. “They said, ‘Do you know, in my time of food shortages, people didn’t have food, so how can you waste your food?’ ” Zhong says. So she cleaned her plate even if she was very full.

When her father came home from business trips with boxes of a Chinese soft drink called Jianlibao, she started to put on weight. Drinking four and five cans a day made her weight jump to 143 pounds by the time she was 18. At 5-foot-3, that would put her barely into the “overweight” category by U.S. standards, but she was miserable, getting kicked off her school’s dance team for being too fat and being teased by boys who liked her skinnier pals. Today, Zhong says she spends many hours at the gym to stay slim.

Obesity has tended to be an issue that grows along with affluence. Prosperity means bigger paychecks, which can mean more meat, fast foods and bigger meals. Meanwhile, long hours at desk or factory jobs instead of agricultural ones mean less physical activity. The obesity problem is primarily an urban one in a population that is rapidly urbanizing.

China also has particular problems associated with contaminted food, that tend to add to the obesity problem. A recent study found that scares about contaminated milk, fruit and vegetables have made consumers feel more safe buying and eating packaged foods, which are perceived to be less tainted. If it’s packaged and done by Nestle, they’re thinking and hoping that there is not going to be poison” in the food. Yet, the fat and sugar content of many packaged foods is often much higher than that of fresh food.

Additionally, the Chinese often display an odd fascination for obesity. Two years ago, a shopping mall in the city of Shenyang held an obesity competition to celebrate International Women’s Day. Contestants stood onstage in frilly white wedding dresses.

Like many people in western nations, Chinese are turning to surgical solutions for weight loss. Huiqi Yang, a general surgeon at Beijing United Family Hospital, has just started offering an operation in which an adjustable band is surgically tied around the stomach to constrict it, leading patients to eat less. Chinese doctors have been doing such bariatric surgeries for 15 years, but Yang says there is a growing interest in gastric surgery. She said she performed about 100 gastric-band surgeries in recent years at her previous hospital, in the city of Tianjin.

Meanwhile, as obesity rises so do the ills associated with it.

A recent World Bank report said diabetes, heart disease and hypertension are among several noncommunicable diseases threatening China and other countries. The International Diabetes Federation estimates that there are 92.3 million diabetics in China. No other country has as many diabetics — not surprising, given that China is the most populous country in the world — and even China’s outgoing president, Hu Jintao, is rumored to have diabetes.